Reach for the sky
10 April, 2012
Reality bites: the truth about investment banking in Asia
10 April, 2012Discovery Channel Magazine, April 2012
If you’ve got a spare US$60,000, you can go and see Titanic for yourself – but not for much longer. This year’s expeditions in the Russian-built Mir submersibles, which will take dozens of tourists down to the wreck in July and August, are expected to be the last trips of their kind for the foreseeable future.
Aside from one-off charters, the main company that offers these dives is called Deep Ocean Expeditions. Expeditions take two weeks at a time, sailing on a support vessel from St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada, usually carrying 20 tourists who will dive. It takes about a day and a half to reach the dive site, and then the submersibles dive in pairs, with one Russian pilot and two paying passengers in each. It’s a long day, typically 10 hours all told, so the two week duration of the trip reflects the time it takes to get everybody down to see the wreck in suitable diving weather while still allowing the pilots time to rest and do maintenance.
One expedition team member this time, making his 11th visit to the dive site, will be Don Walsh. Regular readers of DCM (“Deepest Man”, June 2010) will remember him as the only man alive who has been to the deepest point in the world’s oceans – Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, which he did in an odd-looking bathyscaphe called the Trieste in 1960. He dived on the wreck about 10 years ago.
The first thing one sees of the wreck is, as Walsh puts it, “the money shot: coming right up to that bow.” This, thanks in no small part to Jim Cameron’s movie, is much the most iconic sight of the wreck. Even after a two and a half hour descent almost four kilometres down, the pilots – currently Yvgeniy Cherniaev and Victor Nischeta, supporting chief scientist Anatoly Sagalevitch – are skilled enough to make it the first sight tourists encounter at the bottom. “The Russian pilots have spent more time on the Titanic than Captain Smith did,” says Walsh. “So once they land on the bottom they know exactly where to go.”
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